


Coming Home

by DustySoul



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Curtain Fic, Homelessness, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-11-23 16:03:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11405811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DustySoul/pseuds/DustySoul
Summary: If no one else knows her, needs no other word than ‘vagrant’ to call her by, than does she truly have a name?





	1. An Exchange of Phone Calls

**Author's Note:**

> Not Civil War compliant.

_On a dark New York street a figure stands at a phone booth. It slides coins into the machine. Takes a deep breath in._

_Beep._

 

“I… um… I don’t know when - or if - you’ll even get this… I… I just wanted to let you know… it’s me…

  
I’m sure you’ve heard the new… the whole world has… about D.C. … Well… I’m free.

  
And… uh… I- I remember, at least… I think I do. Not… Not all of it feels… real. Or at least… not all of it feels like it happened to me. But… I remember 1991. And… And… I just wanted to let you know, I didn’t blame you. You did what you had to. And um… I’ve… I’ve looked um… located the others… the… the ones I remember… And… And… Um…

 

I’m… I’m real damn proud, of you, you know. It um…

  
God.

  
Fuck…

  
It’s just… It’s what I would have done… Or, it’s what I would have wanted to be able to do. You um… You did good. Real good. And… I’m not mad… you left me… behind.

  
I’m- I’m not- I forgive you? Okay. That’s what I’m - I’m trying to say here, I forgive you. I understand.  
Just…

  
If you needed to hear it.

  
We’re all in the same… uh… the same… ship… shit… situation. And… that. Um…

  
Good- good-bye.

 

…

 

Don’t! Don’t feel the need to um… call back. Or anything. But I… um, if - if you wanted to… The number… it’s 555-9430.

  
And um… Look… It’s um… I just… I understand… I’d understand if you never wanted to hear for me again. It’s um… hard. Just to talk… to your… your voice mail.”

 

 _There’s a slightly hysterical laugh over the line._  
_A deep breath._

 

“Really… don’t feel bad. Just. Whatever you need, okay? That’s um. Yeah. That’s what I had to say.

  
I’m free. I remember. I’m working on it. And… and I forgive you. Yeah… yeah… that’s uh… that’s… that’s everything.

  
Have a… have a really damned good life. Best revenge, or- I think… all that… Yeah…”

 

 

_Beep._

  
“Hey, it’s good to hear from you.”

  
_Sigh._

  
“I know… I know what you must be going through right now…

  
And I’m sorry.

  
…

  
Uh, just, ugh. Let’s… Let’s start over.

  
Hi, hello, I’m Rebecca. I look forward to learning your name, once you settle on one. And I remember you too.

  
What you said… it means a lot. I’m really… I’m so sorry… I… I would have… I wouldn’t have left you behind. If there was any other choice… I… you didn’t deserve… none of us deserved that.”

  
Rebeca takes a deep breath, pauses, then release it.

  
“It’s good… that you’re safe now, safe and free. I… well, I saw on the news… but well, we’ve been tracking their files and broad casts for years now.

  
We would have… God, I don’t know. We would have tried to do something. But… Well, we’re not soldiers - we’re not weapons - anymore. We… we just…

  
We just knew Alexander called it your last mission…”

  
_Sigh_

  
“I’m so, so, so, so glad you got out. I - Yeah. I’m glad your free.”


	2. Chapter 2

_When Bucky Barnes died, there was no body to bury. When the Winter Soldier died, their was no soul to rest in peace._

 

Natasha has another lead. Well, it’s a lead to get the next lead. Just bread crumbs, really. Something like that.

They don’t bother telling Steve about it. There’s no need for him to get his hopes up until something more comes of it. He just disappears off to Russia with the name of Natasha’s long lost contact, the coordinates to a base, and no real ideal when he’ll be back.  
  
Natasha’s contact is dead. He has to dig up a grave to be sure, send some tests off to the lab. It was a long shot, anyway.

It’s not a HYDRA base. KGB sure, but it’s been abandoned since before the fall of the SSR.

He can’t put his finger just on what but the place makes him uneasy - there’s nothing he consciously picks up on… but there’s something.

He’s walked through hundreds of bases like these. He’s seen the weapons, the human test subjects (the failures). Abandoned. Still churning out horrors. A little girl with the eyes of an insect and no mouth. The hundreds massacred before him or fleeing under his fire. He’s seen it all.

And he’s never felt like this walking down the halls. Entering this place felt like setting off a curse. Like archaeologists opening those undisturbed Egyptian tombs. You don’t mess with the dead.

Every nerve seems to scream at him - that he doesn’t belong here, to get out, get out.

 _It’s a ghost story._  
_It’s a ghost story._  
_It’s a ghost story._

Is just about all he can think as he clears room after room. And it is. It’s like those stories they used to tell in boy scouts around a fire. Except he’s living it, walking through it’s narrative, not just sitting back and listening.

Some rooms are far worse than others. He finds a chair. One of the chairs. It seems like it should look harmless, but it doesn’t. And not just because it looks a little like a torture device with it’s restraints and crown of electrodes. He knows what these things did, their inner workings and secrets… But it’s not that either.

He feels compelled to move closer, to touch it, to sit in it like the Winter Soldier did while they fried his brain matter. Yet he’s paralyzed to the spot. Screams, muffled with a bite guard, ring in his ears.

And it’s a long, vulnerable moment before he can tear himself away. He keeps his back to the chair as he moves about the room. There are no hard files left and the computers have all been wiped.

 

This feels more vile and sacrilegious than disturbing the earth and the dead that rested there.  
_A living ghost story._

~~~

Natasha’s there to extract him. There’s no joking this time.

“It was horrible.” Sam tells her, a little shell shocked. He’d been… out of it. Almost dissociating while still remaining on high alert. And now that he’s safe, he’s with her…

She sits across from him, open and ready to be confided in.

“It felt like someone was there. But… I never saw anyone.”

“Who?”

Sam’s silent for a long time, “Him, I think. I’ve never… I’ve never felt like maybe he’s been following us, before. But now… It felt like he was there first, waiting, watching, in every shadow. None of the cameras were live but…”

“Newer bugs would be impossible to see.” Natasha affirms.

“It was-” He stops talking abruptly, it’s not until Natasha nods at him, nonjudgmental, that he’s able to go on, “It was like it was haunted.”  
Natasha’s entire demeanor changes. She takes in a deep, shaky breath that pulls her up right as if by strings. When she exhales she slumps. “I think it’s where they first took him, when they found him in the alps.” She says. “It was one of the monster factories, if those were even real.”

Sam nods.

“And the tech they had… We still don’t know how any of it really works - they didn’t know how any of it really worked…”

“What are you saying?”

“Maybe we should talk to Thor. You know what he says about science beyond our understanding.”

“You want to take him here?”

She shrugs. “Something might come of it.”

Meaning it’s almost certain nothing will come of it.

~~~

“We have such things on Asgard.” Thor confirms. “I must admit I do not fully understand them myself, as I was never a caster as my brother was. But… there are ways to take from a person, pieces and memory, and it leaves a residue. It sounds like what you describe.”

Sam nods. “So, an actual ghost.”

“It would not have been lethal.” Thor assures.

“That’s not what I meant…” Sam’s at a loss for how to explain.

Thor nods. “It’s quite odd.” He muses.

“What?”

“On Asgard such magics are used by historians to transfer knowledge from an elder to their students. It would not be an effective form of brain washing or having the effects on memory Captain Roger’s has described.”

~~~

He’s packing to return to the row house when Natasha knocks on his door frame.

“Hey.” She says, sing song, while sticking her head in.

“Hey.” He responds, far less playfully.

She comes in to flop on his bed - uninvited, but not disturbing his clothes and duffel. “You okay, after that last base?”

Sam shrugs.

“You know… you don’t have a normal right now.” Natasha tells him.

Sam sighs. He knows exactly what she’s talking about and exactly how bad it is. “I couldn’t live in DC anymore.” He tells her, “Even if Steve hadn’t asked. It was the price for fighting HYDRA.”

She nods, looking off into the middle distance. “Is there anything I can do to help? House warming presents?”

He sighs, shakes his head, “Man, I just don’t know.”

“You could try settling down for a bit. Getting a job. Take up contract work.”

“I don’t want to… have other obligations right now. That’s the point. Steve has to lead the team and play the big game. So I’m covering his six. I’m on call to jump on the next lead, no matter how small. If I was stationed on some base somewhere I wouldn’t be able to do that. And besides… Bucky might still come home on his own.”

Natasha raises and eyebrow at him, “Why does Steve think Bucky will ‘come home’ to an abandoned house? He doesn’t even _live there_. Honestly, I’d be worried the soldier’ll just pop up at the tower. Give Tony a heart attack.”

“You’re right…”

“Would you just move in already? Please, all you’ve got for decoration is dust on the shelves and skeletons in the closet. At the very least it’s bad for your cover, you got to make it look like _someone_ actually lives there or people will get suspicious.”

“Well… I don’t have a lady’s eye for interior design.”

Natasha rolls her eyes, “And I’ve got an assassin’s one. Would you like me to help you pick out curtains that will hide the blood stains?”

Sam smiles, “I’ll… figure something out.”

“What if you got a room mate?”

“A room mate? What, like off craggiest?”

She shrugs, “Or you could just ask around. Say you’re out of town a lot, inherited this nice little house, and you’re looking for someone to watch over it while you’re gone.”

Sam chuckles, “At least then it would be getting some use.”

“And you won’t have to deal with sour milk anymore.”


	3. A Name

_It’s hers, and only hers._   
_If no one else knows her, needs no other word than ‘vagrant’ to call her by, than does she truly have a name?_

The seizures are getting better. They don’t come as often or last as long or leave her as exhausted and confused. She can sleep through the night now.

  
Her memories better. She has a full year - a _year_ \- of nearly continuous memory. New memories have just about stopped clawing their way back into her. And of those memories, there are even some good ones. Ones from another life. Ones of a blond, beautiful boy burning with passion and fever.

  
And now, she even has a _name_.

  
Things… Things are… Things are pretty good.

 

Except the damn cold.

  
This body doesn’t like the cold.

  
She spends most of her time riding the subway. The people don’t know her name, and they don’t care. They pretend she doesn’t exist. She’s a nobody.  
But it’s warm. And it’s better to be a warm nobody than a cold somebody. At least for now.

  
She tries to sleep, it doesn’t matter that she’s a nobody when she’s asleep.


	4. Light

_ Finding the congregation was a bit of a happy accident. _

_ They well her sometimes it takes a while to go return to G-d. In the meantime, they're happy to put her to work. _

 

“The winter is so beautiful, with its newly fallen snow. Sure enough it will be turned to gray grim by New York’s many boots in half a day, maybe less. Still, it’s been real awful cold lately…”

“Yes.”

Susan pauses chopping the vegetables for just a moment to look at Jamie. When Jamie stays silent she continues. “I worry about our regulars, most of them will be spending the night out in this awful weather, at least some of the time. Or they’ll heat’ll be off or who knows what. It seems a shame to cover it all up in pine, baubles, and tinsel.

She slides the vegetables off the chopping board and into the large pot simmer on the stove. Then she starts on the next food stuffs to be diced. “Although, I suppose, least back in Ye Oldie times, that the Christmas spirit was meant to provide some hope and light in these dark times. I guess that’s kind of like Hanukkah. Light when there should have been none? Hmm. Now it’s just an over commercialized mess.”

Jamie likes working with Susan in the soup kitchen. 

~~~

And with Aaron on the work sight.

“Something on your mind there?” Aaron hands Jamie a bag of tools.

In some ways, it was easier being a ghost, floating from day to day, riding the subway, haunting only herself.

She shakes her head. She wouldn’t be able to find the words even if she wanted to share. And Aaron already knows the most important thing - her name.

Aaron grabs a bag of his own and offers her a smile. “Beautiful day. I think Spring might be my favorite season.” He takes a deep breath of the fresh air. “And I can smell the whole world, just starting to bloom.”

Jamie can small car exhaust and the faint hints of cigarette smoke and garbage. It just smells like New York to her.

“It’s so nice not to have to deal with the snow. And it looks like today will be nice and sunny.” He chats about nothing until the rest of the group arrives.

There’s a new comer, and Jamie knows him but doesn’t know from where. Maybe he’s not new. Maybe he was here last week and the week before. It’s like that a lot, she has to keep meeting the same people over and over until they stick in her head.

He’s military, tall and black, hair buzzed short.

He seeks out Aaron. They talk.

Jamie sorts the bags and tools so they’ll make it to the right work sites. More and more people file in, breaking off into their crews, chatting with each other, generally milling about the parking lot, waiting to leave. It’s a white noise that’s almost calming. Except for how each voice and each loitering person is a variable. It’s an equation too difficult to keep track of but which feels too dangerous to ignore. Still, it’s almost mindless, meaningless. Noise.

“My back still hurts from yesterday, I hope we don’t have to haul anymore stuff out of that basement.”

“We’ll probably be ripping paneling off the wall. Get ready for your shoulders to hate you.”

“At least working with crowbars is fun.”

“Remember when Jeb told Sarah to take off a metal door frame thinking it was wood? She  _ went to town  _ on that sucker. It took her almost all day but she bent it to hell and pried half of it off the wall.”

“Oh yeah! Damn. That must have taken a lot of muscle.”

“Did you say your  _ back _ hurts?”

“Yeah?”

“How long have you been doing this? Are you  _ that  _ out of shape?”

“Fuck off. One: I’ve haven’t even been here a month and two: I have mild chronic pain.”

“But you’re, what 20?”

“Dan, shut up. Young people can be disabled too.”

“Yeah, just look at dead eyes over there. What do you think his problem is?”

“ _ Dan!” _

“What?”

“That was a horrible thing to say! God… What if he heard you?”

“Are you going to make me  _ apologize _ .  **_Mom_ ** ?”

“Jamie.” Aaron calls to her. His voice carries just fine without him needing to raise it.

She sets down the two by fours she’d been hauling and jobs over to him.

There’s mumbling from the group. “ _ It has a name! _ ” Someone, Dan, gets an elbow to the ribs.

“This is Sam.” He gestures to the new comer. “He’s an old friend of mine. He’s also needs someone to house sit for him this weekend.”

Jamie, realizing some response is required, nods. 

“I was just saying to Sam here, that you’re the most honest person I know. You look out for the tools and the work sites and have a great eye for when something's been tampered with which is why I said he should ask you.”

Jamie nods again.

“Alright, I’ll finish packing up, let you two discuss this further.”

Sam watches Aaron leave. He goes to the abandoned two by fours and takes them to the pick up.

“It won’t be a problem for you?”

“Hmm?”

“I’ll be gone a little over a week, will staying at my house be a problem for you? You can also just drive over, let yourself in, and check on things about once a day. Parking’s shit in the area though.”

“Oh, um… no, not a problem.”

“Great, I’m leaving tomorrow and I was really getting desperate. And um, if you could, a plumber’s coming March 1st at noon. I’ve already told him that I won’t be there, just let him in so he can fix the pipe in the basement, will you?”

“Sure.”

Sam pulls out a key and a note, “This is the address and my number. Call if you have any problems.”

“Thanks… Have a nice… vacation?”

“Sure, something like that.”


	5. A House

A House

_It’s unremarkable - small, just barely not touching it’s neighbors. There’s a small garden in the front. The brushes are scraggly. The lawn is more dirt than grass. A lone sun flower sways in the wind, most of it’s petals lost._

 

The first thing Jamie does is inspect Sam’s house. Or, according the Sam’s note, Sam _and_ Steve’s house. It doesn’t look like two people live here. It barely looks like one person lives here. The second bedroom doesn’t even have any sheets or blankets on the mattress.

It’s two stories, the first with a kitchen and a living room. The second with the two bedrooms, each with there own bath. It’s all rather cramped in a way that feels homely.

The second thing Jamie does is inspect Sam’s house. There aren’t any bugs or cameras. The bedrooms each have a lock as do all the windows. The front door has two and the back has three. All of them are sturdy and new. None of them appear to have been tampered with.

The house is… a house.

It’s not a home.

Jamie goes to sit a while in the second bedroom. It seems weird to sleep in a house or on a bed, let alone a _stranger’s_ (and where has she seen him before?) house. Even if it’s in the guest bed. So she goes to her favorite park. The sign says it’s closed past 10 but whoever enforces that law only comes to check on weekends.

 

She comes back to the house around sunrise the next morning. Nothing seems to have been disturbed in the night. She does a perimeter check before inspecting the inside once more. Nothing.

It’s just… _nothing._

Her only commitments are to Aaron and his volunteer group on the weekends, and the soup kitchen in the evenings. Until then she has nothing else to do. Except now.

 _House sit._ Watch over a house. This house. Just… be there. In the house. Just in case.

It’s strange. She doesn’t know if she likes it.

 

It starts snowing around three. Just flurries. It doesn’t stop.

Jamie checks in on the house again after her shift at the kitchen. The house is warm, the heat on low. (It’s good for the pipes.)

The decision to spend the night here… It’s not one Jamie really makes. She takes off her boots, curls up on the sofa, and tells herself that in an hour she’ll leave.

She doesn’t.

And she wakes for the first time without her bones feeling stiff and cold or a scream half formed in her throat.

It’s… nice. Almost like being a real person.

(Real people sleep on beds, not sofas, and in homes, not houses.)

 

The plumber comes. He poses no threats and tampers with nothing except the broken pipe. It’s adequately repaired once he’s done.

Entirely uneventful.

 

Is something _supposed_ to happen?

 

She’s bored. It’s a lot easier to be bored when warm and in a secured location.

It’s a little dusty. The windows are a little dirty. The driveway is covered with even more snow.

She cleans and shovels. It seems polite, especially since Sam’s due to return to his house tomorrow.

 

Someone calls from the landline.

It’s Sam.

Something went wrong on his trip and he’s not able to come back when expected.

Jamie calls him back, “That’s… fine?”

There’s a long pause.

“It’s Jamie! The house sitter!”

Sam chuckles, “Of course, sorry. Yeah, sorry, I hate to do this to you but um… it’s… really important. Just… the 11th? I’ll be back by the 11th.”

“Okay… Bye?”

“Bye, Jamie. Thanks so much again.”

“No problem.”

And she hangs up.

 

Maybe it’s called house sitting instead of home sitting because the house hasn’t become a home yet and needs to be watched over until that happens, in case it falls into disrepair and can’t be a good home…

Jamie starts sleeping in the guest bedroom, finding sheets and blankets in the hall closet.

It’s practice - for Jamie being a real person and for the house being a real home.

 

Sam’s returning tomorrow.

She writes a note, not knowing if she should stay. Is she supposed to greet him and debrief him in person?

… A note seems fine.

_Dear Sam,_

_The plumber came and fixed the pipe. There hasn’t been any sign of other pipes freezing and the faucets are working fine._

_Locks show no sign of having been tampered with. The back and front lawn haven’t been encroached upon except for standard cat and raccoon traffic._

_There looks to have been a mouse problem in the basement at one point - probably cured thanks to the flooding._

_I have nothing else to report._

_If I forgot to comment on anything you were particularly worried about feel free to call me._

_Best wishes,_

_Jamie._

She washes the sheets she’d used, refolds them, and returns them to their place in the forgotten shelves. Just before dark she inspects the house one last time, removing any trace of her presence in this space. All that remains in the empty house is the faint lemony smell of oil soap and the absence of dust.

It’s still not a nice place to return to. It’s walls are faded. Even though the locks on the window’s are new, the paint on the windows themselves are peeling and they have a tendency to stick.

It’s still too empty.


	6. A Ghost Story

A Ghost Story

_“He’s a ghost story, that’s all I know Sam.”_

_(He might be Steve’s best friend.)_

 

April 4th 2015

They wind up in a little restaurant cramped in a refurbished row house between an ice-cream parlor and a hair salon. It’s just warm enough to sit out on the roof, strung up with fairy lights. It’s one of those quiet evenings where every moment lasts for an eternity before sliding seamlessly into the next. The infinity above, visible in the black sky - barely dotted with stars, matches the infinity within. It’s a momentous sort of night that will evaporate in the day light.

“He’s still out there, Sam.”

Sam nods. All these months he’s looked Steve in the eye and saw the pain and desperation and love within them every time he speaks of Bucky. There’s not a lot he can say, not a lot that would be helpful. _Beating yourself up about it isn’t going to help us find him faster. You’ve done everything you can. Chin up._ What bullshit.

“You know.” Sam says after a long silence, “Ghost stories, they really took off around the civil war.”

Steve looks up from where he’s been picking the label of his bear bottle.

“Because, you see, everyone back home, the families of those young soldiers, they didn’t have a body. And before that, whenever someone died there was a body. You could see it. You could tell. You knew beyond any shadow of a doubt. They’re gone. But not during the war. Now, I don’t know how many young men died but none of them were brought home.”

“And their wives and children and so forth, they couldn’t accept it. So they told stories about those soldiers still being out there, somewhere… somewhere they could find them.”

“What are you saying?”

Sam shrugs, “Words, mostly.” He takes a sip of his beer, “I guess… You can’t move on, not without knowing one way or another what happened. And… Well, that makes sense. Perfect sense. It’s not about if the ghosts are at rest, it’s about if you are.”

“I wanted to… When he fell off that train I wanted to go back and look…” Steve shrugs, “A storm had just come in, the chance we’d… And it was in enemy territory. But… _He’s out there, Sam._ ”

“He is.” Sam looks away. He thinks of Bucky. He knows, from everything Steve’s told him and from his own experiences in DC, that Bucky’s still alive. He’s resilient. It’s not the bastardized HYDRA serum made him so. Bucky stuck beside Steve even as he got into fights that left them both bruised up and bloody. After Azzano, he’d been given the chance to go home. Steve was shocked to learn that from the Smithsonian exhibit.

“I can’t believe that I just…” Steve takes a deep breath, “I never thought I’d outlive him.” He looks up to Sam, his eyes shining. “I was… for so long I was so sick. I knew… we both new I’d die first and I’d die young… And… maybe… some small part of me would rather die in those trenches then dying of pneumonia in some dingy apartment…”

Sam’s throat constricts at Steve’s words. He knows why Bucky did it.

Steve continues, drawing in another deep breath. “And then, with the serum it was like I was invincible. And Bucky always seemed invincible. It never occurred to me, not even when he shipped out… that he’d die out there. When I pulled him off that table… No one else made it. Just him… I thought he could make it threw anything.”

Sam nods. “It hasn’t been that long for you, has it?”

“Three years. I mean, two, when everything happened. It was… it happened right when it didn’t hurt so much… to remember him. And now um… it hurts all over again.” He goes back to picking at the bear bottle. “I… I almost knew what it was like, to be okay… to be okay with him gone. And now…”

Sam nods.

“If… If he was just here! God… I’m sorry.”

“S’fine. Get as mad as you want, it’s just us up here.”

“If he was just here… I could figure out how to be okay again.”

Sam reaches out, squeezes Steve’s shoulder. Steve makes a strangle sort of noise. “You’ll be okay again, you’ll figure it out. Hey, maybe he’s out there, doing the same thing.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

“Time is the best medicine. Sometimes, waiting is the only thing you can do, the only thing that makes it better.”

“Waiting for what?”

“I don’t know, to get used to the pain? To make room to feel other things again? Hey, I may have been a counselor, but I have no idea how grief works.”

“No?”

Sam shakes his head, “It’s crazy and unpredictable. And completely normal being so. It amazes me - amazed me - when I worked at the VA, how the human heart could go through so much… and still come out functioning on the other side. What happened over there… there were times I thought it should have killed all of us.”

Steve nods a couple times. “Yeah… Yeah…” And clears his throat.

“We’ll find him… one day. In the mean time, don’t forget to live life.”

“I’ll try.”

Sam smiles, and thinks _these anniversaries are the worst_.

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to The Antidiogenes Club for helping me through this, and other fics.


End file.
